• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

At first during the campaign Bush refused on principle to answer questions about cocaine. Then, because he was applying for a federal job (president) he had to fill out a form that asked if had used illegal drugs in the past seven years. Bush voluntarily told the press he was able to answer no.

A clever reporter asked whether he could have given the same answer when his father was president and federal forms asked about drug use for the prior fifteen years.

“Uh, let’s see here . . . Yes, I could have,” Bush said after a pause. Then, when asked again if he had ever used cocaine, Bush refused to give an answer. His dad was inaugurated in 1989. Therefore, using the “Amazing Colossal President” test, George W. Bush snorted cocaine between 1958 and 1974, assuming he didn’t do coke before he was twelve.

So, we’ve got the Patients’ Bill of Rights he vetoed, the draft-dodging, the drunk driving, and the cocaine. But what about the serious stuff? Like how he got rich? Like the Harken business—when, as a member of the audit committee, he dumped his stock just before it was about to tank and was eight months late in filing documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission? Like his ridiculously underanalyzed tax plan?

If this is too much to hold in your mind all at one time, here’s a simple chart to summarize the raw material the media could have used to go negative against the candidates:

* * *

Gore

Supposedly claimed to have discovered a canal

“All I know is that’s what he told reporters in Tennessee”

Funded the Internet, which changed history forever

* * *

Bush

Skirted securities law by selling Harken Energy stocks while sitting on audit committee; lied about having supported Texas Patients’ Bill of Rights and hate crime bill

“By far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom end of the spectrum”2

Snorted cocaine, dodged draft, drove drunk into a hedge

* * *

In other words, both candidates made serious mistakes and legitimate questions could have been raised about their fitness for national office. Why then did Bush get twice as many positive stories and so many fewer negative stories? Hummus. That’s right. Remember the oil in the hummus?

It’s the other biases that killed Gore. Pack mentality. Once the pack had decided the story line on Gore, everybody jumped aboard and rode all the way to November. Also, laziness. That’s a biiiiig bias. Why bother to check facts when you can quote yesterday’s story about a story that ran the day before yesterday?

Negativity. What’s more likely to hit the front page? Gore Tells Inspirational Story to High Schoolers? Or Gore Lies Again?

Plus, Bush was a new story. Gore was old. And the media just didn’t like Gore. And by attacking him, reporters were safe from the accusation of having a liberal bias. Or were they?

Writing in the Charleston Gazette, Dan Radmacher cited a study by Howard Kurtz that found almost twice as many pro-Bush stories as pro-Gore stories on the front page of The New York Times during the campaign. An incredulous Ann Coulter could find only one explanation for a liberal newspaper implying a conservative bias in the Times: “The sheer joy liberals take in telling lies . . . They take insolent pleasure in saying absurd things.”

I called Radmacher at his Charleston, West Virginia, office. TeamFranken transcribed the conversation.

AL: Hi, Dan. It’s Al Franken. Did you know that Ann Coulter referred to one of your columns in her book?

DAN RADMACHER: Really?

AL: It was the one where you cited Howard Kurtz’s study on media coverage during the election.

DAN: Oh God. What did she say?

AL: That’s actually why I’m calling. She said that your column shows that liberals take sheer joy in telling lies. So I wanted to ask you: Do you take sheer joy in telling lies?

DAN: Yes. Yes, I do.

AL: Shoot. That proves her point, then. Also, she mentions insolent pleasure. Do you get insolent pleasure from lying?

DAN: Yeah. I guess